


meta - Captain Philippa Georgiou, pain, & enmity

by m_class



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Blood, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Gender, Kindness, Kirk and Avasarala and Éowyn, Mentions of Ableism, Meta, Nonfiction, Pain, Puppies, Racism, Seven of Nine’s spectacular ‘only thing worse’ quote, Space Diplomacy, Starfleet, War, food/diet talk - marked at its beginning and end, general references to bad stuff from Season 1, mildly? disturbing imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27324187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: Near the end of Discovery Season 1, I remember reading a review that encapsulated Mirror Georgiou as being mirror-universe-evil but also a better strategist than Prime Georgiou, because she was quicker on the uptake than Prime Georgiou had been when Burnham spoke with each of them, respectively, about the current relevant threats.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	meta - Captain Philippa Georgiou, pain, & enmity

**Author's Note:**

> [Orig. posted to Tumblr](https://starfleetdoesntfirefirst.tumblr.com/post/623452708011114496/popping-back-into-disco-fandom-after-a-busy-week)  
> July 2020
> 
> This particular meta isn’t my submission but since it is about Prime Georgiou...obligatory plug for [the Captain Georgiou fanbook](https://wearecaptaingeorgiou.tumblr.com/), currently open for submissions! Anything but fanfic (meta-analysis! nail art! recipes!) welcome; no submission too small <3

Thinking about the degree to which Cpt. Georgiou’s story is about kindness and integrity, and the degree to which that means that (long before the events of later in the season make this incredibly explicit) it is therefore about the enemy within.

Like any self-respecting Star Trek captain fangirl, I have firm opinions on Georgiou’s Coolest Moments, Most Underrated Qualities, etc. The moment that beats out of a hell of a lot of Cool Underrated Moments/Qualities to reach second-place, extremely-close-to-first place for me is the moment when she tells Burnham that retreat is not an option not only because they’re in Federation space but also because they are the only line of defense for the space station and the Andorian colony behind them. 

It’s not really a quotable-quote, but to me, it’s one of her most awesome moments, because it’s what makes much of the rest of the pilot episodes an awesome story about a captain and her crew looking out for innocent people, rather than about a captain risking and ultimately losing her ship and multiple members of her crew for the sake of space!diplomatic posturing.

But my first-place Underrated Georgiou Moment is the one that it’s tempting to call that moment’s inverse: _We don’t start shooting on a hunch, and we don’t take innocent lives, period._

Georgiou looks out for the people on the base behind her, and she looks out for people in the starship confronting hers, which is only the inverse of looking out for innocent people if you’re willing to stake their lives on the assumption that they are not innocent.

 **< food/diet talk>** I once read an advice column where someone had written in to say that they wanted to eat more ‘healthy food,’ but that fast and processed food was faster, cheaper, and better-tasting. The advice columnist began their response with _Well, you’re right–fast food is faster, cheaper, and better-tasting!_ At the time, having grown up with years of war-on-obesity type messages about how home-cooked fresh-vegetable-based meals were in fact Faster and Cheaper and More Delicious than fast food, I clutched my pearls at this.

What the advice columnist said was, of course, in many contexts, correct. We tell our children that fresh food is always cheap and easy to prepare and will save them, **< /food/diet talk>** and that kindness feels good and pleasant and makes their lives better, and sometimes it does, but sometimes it’s brutal and painful and entirely capable of making things worse. I think one reason I find Georgiou’s Trek Captain StoryTM comforting is because of the way her story as a whole makes me feel less alone in not necessarily associating acting with kindness with feelings of softness or pleasure or fulfillment. 

Acting with kindness is so often swallowing a grenade; wrapping your arms around it. Matter can’t be created or destroyed and even in the movies whose directors haven’t seen the Mythbusters episode about how jumping on a grenade probably wouldn’t work anyway, you can’t put the pin back into it. The pain has to go somewhere.

Kindness and integrity are about shouldering the pain–even though you don’t deserve it; even though the very act of taking the pain onto yourself not only hurts you but also might in turn hurt someone else. Or, sometimes, kindness and integrity and supporting someone else are about finding a way to offload some of the weight onto another, different someone-else who doesn’t deserve the pain either but maybe, in this moment, is more capable of shouldering it than the person you’re looking out for would be. Kindness is entirely capable of wounding its practitioners, or, to paraphrase Seven of Nine: _It’s hopeless and pointless and exhausting, and the only thing worse would be giving up._

Despite all those poems about women being wolves (the idea of wolves), and letting our teeth drip with blood and thorns grow from our hair, much of the time the person in the path of our aching teeth is not the person who deserves to cut by them. Have you ever wished someone, a good person!, ‘Good morning,’ and gotten a perhaps-justified glare from their exhaustion-smudged eyes? Because they’re in such a bad mood, because they’re in so much pain, because of course they would have glared at anyone who spoke to them? Except that, of course, it turns out they were quite capable of warmly greeting their boss or their lover or the more valued–and less visibly disabled–person who walks into the room after you. Even justified rage and pain and desire, when released indiscriminately, often do discriminate.

Near the end of Discovery Season 1, I remember reading a review that encapsulated Mirror Georgiou as being mirror-universe-evil but also a better strategist than Prime Georgiou, because she was quicker on the uptake than Prime Georgiou had been when Burnham spoke with each of them, respectively, about the current relevant threats. But deciding who is better at threat assessment necessitates defining what is a threat. 

There’s a piece of fan art I’ve always wanted to paint if a) I had significantly greater art skill, b) I had the literal weeks it would take to paint a multi-panel art piece, and c) art on the theme of ‘person protecting someone else with their body’ didn’t inevitably come across looking like the “this is so sad” poorly-scaled soldier protecting cartoon toddler meme: Captain Georgiou and a small Shenzhou, a la all those sick Janeway-chilling-with-small-floating-Voyager-in-space artworks, standing in space with the space station behind her and the Klingon fleet in front of her. She is protecting the space station behind her from war; in subsequent panels, the viewpoint revolves around her and the little Shenzhou, and the images behind her shift to show the people we know and love on the Discovery–Culber and Stamets kissing; Burnham and Stamets releasing the tardigrade back into space; everything we recognize from ST:DSC’s Federation as innocent and loveable and worth protecting. 

But as we circle back around to the same viewpoint again, the images shift. Instead of the Klingon fleet in front of Georgiou and the Shenzhou, we see the innocent people living their lives on Qo’noS; behind her, we see Mirror Georgiou bombing the rebel base; Mirror Georgiou preparing to execute Burnham; Cornwell and Sarek working with Mirror Georgiou to destroy Qo’noS; Qo’noS exploding into fiery nothingness. Is Prime Georgiou defending what is behind her from what is in front of her, or holding back what is behind her to protect the rest of the universe?

What is a Star Trek captain’s coolest #Underrated Moment?

Would Captain Georgiou have been able to effect more net positive good in the universe if she’d been just a bit more ruthless, a bit less Captain Kirk and a bit more Chrisjen Avasarala from The Expanse, and had elbowed her way up in the ranks to become an admiral by the time of the war? Maybe! To quote another advice column: _“Should” Éowyn have stayed behind in Edoras to be Queen? Probably._

(Because that one’s a complimentary quote and Tumblr will hide the post if I link: “Commander Logic tells you how to get unstuck,” captain awkward dot com, which I do not endorse entirely as an advice site but which definitely has its moments.)

But then, of course, there’s no woman-Hobbit tag team to kill the Witch-King of Angmar (who is most definitely not Innocent People), and then maybe Admiral Georgiou helps create a better Federation that flawlessly averts the war in the first place and buys all of its citizens a new puppy, or maybe a Georgiou who would make the choice to ruthlessly cut her way to the top is, in fact, the Georgiou we meet at the end of Season 1 who made the choice to ruthlessly cut her way to the top and now stands there, using a mirrored Starfleet to control a mirrored universe.

Here is the story we got instead: Georgiou was a captain and not an admiral, and she didn’t avert a war, and she lectured Burnham like a child and was space-racist about Saru and didn’t even always wrap her own indiscriminate cruelty and pain and desire safely in her arms. 

(And yes, I’ll always be disappointed that we didn’t get seven seasons of Captain Georgiou, or one season of Captain Georgiou and six season of Captain Burnham and background Admiral Georgiou, or… Prime Georgiou isn’t just comforting and hopeful and inspiring; she has flaws and impulsiveness and ruthlessness herself. What would it be like to see the story where she _grows?)_

But she did not start shooting on a hunch, and she did not take innocent lives. She put her own ruthlessness into the service of holding back what was behind her as much as facing down what was in front of her. She changed the people who she served with and captained, like every other cliched metaphor of ripples in a pond, and when Starfleet became the enemy within, and partnered with her own mirrored enemy within to try to kill millions of innocent adults and babies and children, it was the woman who had been the Shenzhou’s first officer who was the first to stand and say _No,_ and the woman who had been the Shenzhou’s pilot who was the second.

I enjoyed seeing Mirror Georgiou stab Mirror Lorca as much as I enjoyed seeing Éowyn stab the Witch-King of Angmar. I don’t have a problem with the _power_ part of _power fantasy._ But sometimes the Underrated Moment looks uncool. Sometimes the only way to act with integrity is to give something up rather than to Stand Up For Yourself The Way You Deserve, and the only way to look out for someone else hurts you in a way that is painful and awful and unfair. Even the most satisfying power fantasy is still a fantasy.

I would have preferred to see Lorca live and stand trial for crimes against humanity not for his sake but because a Terran Empire that condoned death as a consequence for failure is only a mirror to a Federation that condoned life in prison as a consequence for mutiny.

What do you see as Starfleet’s greatest threat?


End file.
